Apartheid

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hand’. This is precisely the way apartheid’s politicians, soldiers, businesspeople, defenders,
sympathizers and allies want it to be treated and misunderstood.
Another main reason why apartheid is thus reduced to violence is that violence often
becomes the only possible form of resistance, and the victims of apartheid can then be blamed
for it. The TRC hearings investigating killings or abuses ordered by the ANC or by Mandela’s
former wife, Winnie Mandela, seem to have attracted at least as much media attention around
the world as the ones about crimes perpetrated by apartheid’s defenders. Accountability must
apply, but proportionality must also be observed.
Under apartheid conditions, the laws, the courts, the executive and legislative powers,
as well as the market, are all stacked against the conquered majority. Violence is of course the
very last, desperate resort. Every member of the oppressed majority knows that the invading
minority set up its oppressive system on the basis of military superiority. But counterviolence,
usually carried out in full awareness that the losses will be huge, often seems to be
the only possible option for the oppressed majority, aside from acquiescence, which may well
mean little apart from a more or less slow death without dignity.
After the fact of conquest, the indigenous therefore often feel cornered and more or
less pushed into ‘instigating violence’, i.e. fighting back, and that is the moment when the
oppressors can grab the opportunity and perform a little extra genocide on the side without
world condemnation and even without any bad conscience whatsoever among its own people
and supporters. Now, it is the apartheid elite which is seen as ‘retaliating’ or ‘responding’ (see
Section II.9.3), as defending itself. Furthermore, as the black South Africans, the Palestinians,
and presumably also the Egyptians under Greek and Roman rule found out: if you can not
even stage an unarmed, peaceful protest without getting killed or targeted with lethal force in
return, there appears to be little else to do than to proceed with armed resistance. And any
assurances by the soldiers or politicians of ‘peace talks’ or a ‘peace process’ must therefore be
regarded as hypocrisy, that is, as long as the underlying reality of apartheid is not removed.
Armed resistance may be provoked even more directly by the elites, as the following
passage on alleged Israeli provocation of Palestinian militancy prior to the outbreak of the
Second Intifada in September 2000 suggests:
Arms sales [to Palestinian militant groups] by the Israeli mafia,
connected either to the Israeli army or directly to Israeli intelligence
services through collaborators, were phenomenal in scale at this time,
being a trap for leading the Palestinian factions into civil war. The
spread of arms in the occupied territories acted as bait to encourage
the Palestinians to become militarized… 301
Violence is the main issue in my view, too, but it must include the fact of invasion, of
where, when and how the violence between the ethnic groups of an apartheid society once
actually started. Moreover, violence is not the only issue. It is not the only gross human rights
violation to occur under apartheid. The crime of apartheid, the crime against humanity, is not
only the physical violence – although it sometimes even overlaps with genocide – but a
pervading structure which reaches into all areas of life (and death).
Yet, apart from extremist thought, e.g. the de-humanization of the adversary, violence
is the only gross human rights violation which can also be perpetrated and carried out by
members of the oppressed, indigenous majority under apartheid. (The repopulation through
relatively natural means by the oppressed is not the same as the repopulation through
301 Saleh: Mixed Record of Intifada, 2002. I have not been able to confirm this record of events through any other
sources, and I feel that this account should be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, it is well known that many
if not most of the firearms used by Palestinian militants are bought directly (in a much less conspiratorial way)
from individual Israeli soldiers for financial reasons. See, for instance, Heritage: New Generation of Militants
Emerges in West Bank, 2003.